The Figures of Beauty

by David Macfarlane

  When Grace Barton was amused there were those who couldn’t escape the suspicion that she was amused at them. There was something a little dangerous in her intelligence. When she smiled her teeth were very white, set off, as they were, against her tanned skin. Only the built-up sole of her left boot and the shortened, tilted rhythm of her step prevented people from immediately assuming she was a runner, or a tennis player, or a champion golfer. There was something about Grace Barton that brought to mind a beautiful pony.

  He found the confidence in her mouth and eyes simultaneously attractive and disconcerting—a lack of equilibrium that he enjoyed. Her slender face was of so established a character that any change—fewer freckles, for example—was impossible to imagine.

  Julian Morrow felt no threat. He could see that her pleasure—pleasure in the appearance of sunlight on the bone-coloured walls as the weather cleared, in the diminishing rattle of wooden wheels on stone as the quarry wagon became more distant on Via Carriona, in the Welshman in the Borsalino on the old stone bridge—was a pleasure general in nature. It coincided with his own.

  Morrow imagined that prior to her engagement to Argue Barton, more than a few of Grace’s suitors had made the mistake of assuming she’d think herself lucky to have them. Their vain misjudgment was probably because of her bad leg. Or because her slender good looks were more sharp and boyish than what was in fashion. Or because her lively, assertive face obviously could not accommodate the wide-eyed blankness of acquiescence that was equally in mode.

  She’d been underestimated by the handsome young fellows who had called upon her. Morrow guessed that Barton, with the wariness older men bring to younger women, did not make the same mistake.

  Cathcart. Morrow let the name echo in the business corridors of his brain while he chatted with great enthusiasm about the name of the river, about the dogs in the cobbled street, about the statue they were inspecting. Cathcart. Morrow ran the name through his memory of contracts and commissions. He concluded that to his knowledge he had no business in a place called Cathcart. And his knowledge of these matters was extensive.

  He owned several marble workshops in town, each employing a dozen or so skilled artisans. He owned several quarries, each providing work for hundreds of men. There were office lobbies in New York and Chicago, mansions in Tuxedo Park and Baltimore, public facilities in Shepherd’s Bush and Leicester Square, all built with his stone. Furniture outlets in England and the United States were stocked with his mantels, his sconces, his balustrades, his dresser-tops, his ornamental replicas of famous sculptures. There were even a few reputable shops in London and New York that carried his recently manufactured “antiques.”

  Did Cathcart have no churches, no town squares, no cemeteries, no need for memorials to the dead of Ypres, or Amiens, or Vimy Ridge, or the Somme? Were there no train stations, no public washrooms, no office lobbies, no pools, or private gardens? Morrow thought that probably there were. And that, perhaps, there could be more.

  “I am in newspapers,” Argue Barton said.

  Morrow noted the plural. He could see that the man, though dressed for touring, frequented an excellent haberdashery. He had noticed the label on the foulard. The shop was in Paris, around the corner from the George-V. Morrow’s firm had supplied the marble for the hotel’s bathrooms. He shopped at the same store himself. He was familiar with its prices.

  They stood at a niche in the old town wall. “The marble statue dates from the late Roman Empire,” Morrow explained.

  The Bartons were pleased to find so genial a source of information. “What fun,” Grace said to her husband, putting her arm through his and tilting her head in attention to their guide.

  It was only in retrospect that they realized that this was a turning point in their honeymoon. Had they never encountered Julian Morrow they would likely have said that their European trip had been most pleasant—and they would have been perfectly sincere. Delightful was what it ended up becoming. Morrow’s guess that they were somewhere between falling and being in love proved to be exactly right.

  The Romans, Morrow continued, were skilled at choosing the finest and most durable stone. “There are medieval cathedrals,” he said to Grace and Argue Barton, “much younger than this piece. A thousand years younger, in fact. And the stone of their construction has deteriorated far beyond what you see here.”

  The statue was worn by time and by weather, but its principal figure was clear. It was a young man. “Poised to leap into a deep chasm,” Morrow explained to his new friends. “To demonstrate his willingness to sacrifice himself—his strength, his beauty, his youth. For Rome, you see.”

  “Rather a waste,” said Grace. Her abrupt tone and the brief flash of anger that crossed her face revealed what Morrow took to be strong views on the Great War. But this avenue of conversation was interrupted by the approach of an old man to where they were standing on the bridge. His stubbled face was thin and deeply wrinkled. He had a cane.

  It was the old man’s habit to stop anyone he passed on the Ponte delle Lacrime to tell them about the dangerous road, and the dangerous work, and about the mournful sound of the horn that announced an accident in the quarries.

  “Ca-vay,” Julian Morrow translated for the Bartons. “The quarries.” He gave the old man a few coins, then waved him away.

  The compulsion to transform something fleeting into something permanent is among the most ancient of human instincts. So Julian Morrow said. Had his voice become any louder it would have required a stage and a hall.

  “I feel I should be taking notes,” said Grace.

  Morrow waved off the suggestion. “I’ve noticed that, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, the clear air of the region makes for a clear memory. Notes will not be necessary. You shall see.”

  Morrow was working up a speech for the Arts and Letters Club in Pontypool to be delivered at a luncheon lecture several months hence. It was already partly written. But with the judicious use of thoughtful pauses, Julian Morrow was able to give the Bartons the impression that his thoughts were taking form before their very eyes.

  “Our awareness of transience,” Morrow continued, “jostles constantly against the hope that our stories will last. Possibly the urge to create is nothing more than the wish to contradict the inevitability of death.”

  Grace Barton expressed some mock dismay at this sad thought—and it was the humour in her eyes that inspired him to continue full-voiced, unabated.

  “We imagine that a human figure cannot simply vanish. So inglorious a disappearance seems impossible. And so from antiquity, faces and bodies, heads and torsos were memorialized in mud, in sand, in clay.”

  The history of sculpture, so he explained, is a history of convergence: of tools and material. Wood could not be carved without flint, just as stone could not be shaped—not finely, not reliably—until the advent of iron. As tools improved, the choice of materials became more specific to the task at hand. The need to memorialize—the urge to create tombs and portraits—became part of something else. By the time marble emerged as a lasting and surprisingly adaptable substance, by the time the tools that could work it became more sophisticated, by the time the marble quarries of Carrara began to dominate the worlds of architecture and sculpture, the motives for carving stone had become complicated. What was being immortalized by artists was not only a noble face that needed to be remembered by citizens gathered in a piazza. It was not only a parable that needed to be recalled by worshippers standing humbly in the shadows of a great cathedral. What was being caught, what artists were rescuing from the relentless stream of the temporal, was beauty itself. This is what sculptors—“from Renaissance masters,” said Morrow, “to the most wild of our young modernists”—look for in their labour. “Beauty is what they hope to preserve in the myriad varieties of our marble.”

  Morrow let this settle in. His face was tanned. He smelled pleasantly of tobacco and shaving soap.

  “They change what is ordinary—and what is more ordina
ry than stone?—into what is divine.”

  But the Bartons were puzzled.

  “Myriad?” Argue asked.

  “Isn’t Carrara marble … well, Carrara marble?” his wife added. She pointed as she spoke to the white, weathered stone that told the story of the young Roman consul.

  “Oh, my no,” said Julian Morrow. His laughter boomed. He took some delight in its effect on his audiences.

  “These mountains are like sculpture,” Morrow continued. “Their surface is only the most recent exposure of an intent far beyond our capacity to understand. And we regard the evidence of eternity as we would the marks left by a chisel in an unfinished piece of stone. These are glimpses of something beyond us. Something passing from a past too distant to comprehend to future eons we cannot hope to fathom. What was the Lord thinking when he set the forces of geology into motion that created marble? What was Michelangelo thinking when, with chisel in hand, he first glimpsed the possibilities of his own genius?”

  Morrow was an experienced enough public speaker to recognize long before it became a problem that he was losing the thread of where all this was going. He paused—but his confident stance seemed to insist that this was not because he’d lost whatever point he thought he was making.

  He smiled at his tendency to get carried away.

  “One thing, you say? Marble? No. Here, there is no single marble. There is: Statuario, Ordinario, Bianco Carrara, Bianco P, Calacatta Cremo, Arabescato Classico. The list goes on. And on. There are scores of different varieties of Carrara marble.”

  Julian Morrow stepped back, into the road, pleased with his rhetorical flight. “I see I have confused you entirely. Forgive me.”

  The Bartons protested. Oh no. They found it all fascinating.

  “And the only cure for such confusion—a confusion that is entirely of my own making, I assure you—is thankfully at hand. I am a fulsome tour guide, I’m afraid. It is a weakness of mine. But I hope you will do me the honour of joining me for lunch. My villa is not far—just beyond the next valley.”

  He smiled, as if in apology for his effusion.

  “The sky is clearing. We shall be able to eat by the pool.”

  “Very kind,” said Argue Barton, “but …”

  “We couldn’t possibly …” began Grace.

  “Nonsense,” said Julian Morrow. “The cool mountain air falls from these hills and, in my experience, it inspires those of us lucky enough to breathe it with a healthy appetite. The noon-hour meal is one of the region’s greatest delights. My cook is much sought after. I’m sure you were planning to stop at some point for luncheon …”

  He paused. They did not disagree. In fact, the mention of food reminded them both that the bread and apricot jam served with their coffee at breakfast were slipping into the distant past.

  “Very good then,” said Julian Morrow. “I shall not hear otherwise.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  VIA MADDALENA 19 is the address at which Oliver Hughson first arrived when he hitchhiked to Pietrabella early in May of 1968. His entire European trip had thus far consisted of less than forty-eight hours in Paris and the better part of three cold, wet days on the southbound shoulders of French highways. He’d been obliged to leave Paris much more abruptly than he’d expected—a change of itinerary that left him without money and uncertain where to go.

  Returning to Cathcart had not been an option. His ticket required a stay of no less than three months, no more than twelve. And the only address he had in all of Europe was that of an American he had met during his one and only visit to the Musée du Louvre.

  It was a brief conversation. The man’s name was Richard Christian. They met in the Italian Sculpture Gallery. They were both slowly circling Michelangelo’s unfinished marble The Dying Captive.

  Richard Christian was an American sculptor living in Pietrabella for whom my mother occasionally modelled. He had a large moustache and a pronounced Texan drawl. He was working on an ambitious tableau of marble figures at the time, and he’d gone to Paris for the specific purpose of seeing The Dying Captive—one of the pieces Michelangelo had intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II.

  Michelangelo wanted to quarry the stone for this enormous commission in the quarries closest to the town of Carrara—in part because the marble was of such excellent quality, in part because it was convenient, in part because he was on friendly terms with Marquis Alberigo, the lord of Carrara. But Vasari recounts that while Michelangelo was in Carrara word came to him that the pope “had heard that in the mountains … near Seravezza, in Florentine territory, at the top of the highest mountain, Monte Altissimo, there were marbles of the same beauty and quality as those of Carrara.”

  This was exactly the kind of unhelpful change of plans that popes could be relied upon to make. Michelangelo suspected some other agenda was at play—some repayment of a province; some borrowing of an army.

  “I’ve been traipsing around Italy,” he wrote in a letter to Florence, “borne all kinds of disgrace, suffered every calamity, lacerated my body with cruel toil, put my own life in danger a thousand times …”

  As you see, he was an artist.

  Still, Michelangelo had learned from bitter experience that when it came to disagreements with popes, there was only one rule: the popes always won. He left Carrara. He signed the contract for the stone at a meeting in a dim, airless, second-floor room overlooking the main square of an unappealing provincial town that was a good two-day climb below the quarry from which his marble would come.

  After more than ten minutes of neither Richard nor Oliver orbiting very far away from the marble figure that so held their attention, their gazes met, and Richard raised his bushy eyebrows at Oliver. This was an acknowledgment of a kindred spirit. They were two rocks around which tumbled a teeming rapid of tourists.

  They encountered one another twice more in their slowly opposing circles before Richard turned to Oliver.

  “Unbefuckinglievable,” he said.

  It wasn’t clear that Richard was commenting on the greatness of what they were looking at, or the fact that nobody else in the sculpture gallery appeared to notice it. Richard spoke with a friendly, unfussy ambivalence that often allowed for more than one interpretation of what he was saying. The Texan accent helped.

  Oliver had entered the long, high-ceilinged room, fully intending to breeze through it. That’s what most people seemed to be doing. The tour bus driver had given everyone an hour and a half in the Louvre. But then Oliver saw The Dying Captive. By the time he was talking with Richard, Oliver was already rethinking his itinerary.

  The $1800 for cultural improvement that Oliver Hughson had been awarded as the recipient of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary had been deposited, in his name, by Barton Newspapers in an account at the Société Générale near Place de l’Opéra. It was a bank of such burnished fin de siècle dignity, its 1940s telephones looked too modern.

  Of course, this was long before computers and debit cards. And my father’s comprehensive tour of the youth hostels, cheap hotels, and second-class railway cars of Europe would be just as old-fashioned as his bank. Using Paris as the hub of his continental excursions, he would return to the city as his carefully worked-out travel schedules intersected with his need to draw more funds from his account. He would pick up his mail at the American Express in Place de l’Opéra before catching the next train to Amsterdam or Vienna or Madrid. Or such was the plan.

  MY MOTHER DOESN’T DISCOUNT the possibility that other lives are ruled by chance. She is sure, however, that hers is not. When she begins working a piece of stone, she says she can’t explain what form she is seeking. But she also says, there is a difference between what can’t be explained and what can be imagined. She is not alone in this, as she often points out. Michelangelo believed that the hard, dusty journey of carving is looking for the destination that awaits the carver’s arrival.

  For a sculptor immodest enough to compare her working process to Michelangelo’s, my mothe
r was always understated about its results. “Because I’m not very good” is the most common response she gives to tourists in the Café David who wonder, gingerly, why they have not heard of her. But with my mother, an admission of not being good is not necessarily a sign of being modest. Whether she judges herself in relation to her contemporaries or to the sculptor who, in her opinion, is the greatest who ever lived, is not clear.

  The Dying Captive was not a name chosen by Michelangelo. Death is not at all what it brings to mind to anyone who stops in the Italian Sculpture Gallery and actually looks at it. The name must have been dreamed up by somebody—a priest is my mother’s predictable guess—intent on deflecting attention from the solitary erotic pleasure that appears to be the figure’s dreamy preoccupation.

  Richard and my father spoke for only a few minutes, but that was time enough. Richard talked about a piece of sculpture he was beginning in his studio. It was going to be called The Pope’s Tomb. It would be a dozen figures, each one mounted in a niche of a rectangular stone portico. The whole grouping was going to be about as big as a freezer—a dimension about which Richard’s gallery in Houston had serious misgivings. But Richard didn’t think he could make it any smaller. It was on the large size, he admitted, for a private collection. But it was small for a pope’s tomb.

  Richard told Oliver that he should look him up if ever he got to Italy. As it happened, Oliver had every intention of getting to Italy. He’d even planned to stop in Carrara. He was aware of a connection with the old Barton pool. Archie Hughson had spoken of it.

  Richard said he was going to need male models for The Pope’s Tomb. “Maybe I can give you some work,” he said. But this was not so much an offer as a way of ending a conversation. He didn’t expect to see Oliver again. Nor did Oliver expect to take Richard up on his offer.

  Richard wrote his address on a scrap of paper that he dug out of a well-worn brown leather wallet: Via Maddalena 19, Pietrabella, (Lucca), Italia.